By the Numbers: The McSweeney's 'San Francisco Panorama' Experiment

Last week, McSweeney’s
published their gorgeous, 320-page, one-shot newspaper, the San
Francisco Panorama. We have not yet gotten our hands on one,
here on the other coast, but the reports were all glowing, from the
feature in the LA Times to the New York Times
live-blogging its distribution. “The Panorama,”
McSweeney’s honcho Dave Eggers emailed the Times, “is just a
reminder that readers will be more likely to pay for the physical
paper if they’re given something very different than what we get on
the Internet.” The Panorama said its total editorial costs
were $80,000, which is almost exactly one-third of the total
production costs. It cost $111,000 just to print 23,000 issues; the
total cost, of each issue, including editorial, was $7.98. The
production time was about nine months. There were seven full-time
staff members, and it was published by Oscar Villalon, the former
editor of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s book section, who
took that newspaper’s buyout last fall.

The income from the sale of the paper is hard to estimate. It
was selling for $16 at bookstores and $5 on the street. Reports
said that the original run of 20,000 was “sold out in 90 minutes.”
Bookstores generally only had a stockpile of 200 or fewer; we
presume the majority were sold on the street. The 3000 additional
copies, intended for national distribution, were immediately sold.
A second print run has been ordered, of an unknown amount, to
arrive in January.

The paper’s advertising income was $61,000. That is $2.65 in
income per issue from advertising. That means that, at a price of
$5 for 23,000 issues, the newspaper would have taken a loss of 33
cents. Presumably, the people who purchased the newspaper at the
$16 cost boosted it into profitability.

What was the intention? “The hope is that we can demonstrate
that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only
survive, but actually thrive,” is what Eggers wrote in his mass
email,
way back in June, to all concerned about the fate of print.

But what’s curious about these numbers is that they are magical.
The total editorial costs were $80,000. There were seven full-time
staff members-although the publisher, Villalon, we understand, only
began work there in September.

You can divide $80,000 pretty much any way you like and
not find a way to make this make sense.

According to one contributor, the Panorama was offering a
rate of 12 cents a word to writers. (That’s $240, in total, for a
2000-word piece-well below newspaper market rate. And even below
some Internet rates, which is hard to do.)

There were 218 contributors. So say everyone-everyone, from
William T. Vollman to Stephen King-got paid $250 (to use a nice
round number) for their contributions, whether it was a drawing or
a 10,000 word piece of reportage. (That may not be a terrible
average-although that rate, for a 10,000-word piece, works out to
be a payment of $1200.) That’s $54,500.

But some of those 218 contributors were artists. Another way to
look at it: overall, the paper contains very roughly 350,000 words:
that would be $42,000 at 12 cents a word.

At that average-per-piece, which is presumably pretty low, that
leaves a bit more than $38,000 for the seven full-time staff
members (and, as the paper notes, copy-editing, equipment and “one
lamb”).

Except, there was for illustrations a total budget of $15,000.
This leaves a maximum of $23,000 for the staff, who would have been
paid $3200 each for their labors.

This means that, if the publisher worked on the paper for four
months, and the remaining money were divided equitably, and none of
the other dozens of people working part-time were paid at all, he
would have been taking home $800 a month.